posts tagged with the keyword ‘electrical’

2015.12.09

This is my current power strip situation… Things are tight, tighter than I’d like, and there’s a lot of power strip being wasted. There are three wall warts, and one of them is horizontal while two are vertical. Originally all three were vertical, but I switched one out because there just wasn’t room due to wall warts often take up two outlets because of their width. (I’ve also got a height issue since this is going in a cabinet.)

There are many options for power strips. Sometimes the outlets are vertical, sometimes they are horizontal, or a combination of the two, or some weird twisting rotating thing. For a custom thing, like three wall warts, often the existing solutions aren’t very good. (Especially when space is limited.)

I mentioned that in an ideal world I could just design my own power strip, and then a friend of mine said “Hey, just get these and make your own case!” And then I thought, “Hmmm, maybe that’s not a bad idea!”

But I’m still trying to figure out if it is a bad idea. I don’t know that I could build a surge suppressing power strip for less than the cost of buying one, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Could I design and build something that would be a better fit for what I need. Now, if I were to build a power strip and stick it into a museum exhibit and then ship the exhibit to someone, would that be a bad idea? Maybe… I can see a customer looking at it and questioning the professionalism (and safety) of it. Would a 3D printed power strip pass muster? It seems some power strips are made from ABS, but they typically say “ABS Fire Retardant Plastic Casing”, which may not be the same as 3D printer filament. This could all go terribly wrong, right?